of flight, exile, divided consciousness and the provision of clearances
away from the sectarian ground of the North.
Forever in transit, Sweeney takes lines of flight away from
familiar territory and so Joyceís advice at the end of part two of
Station Island to ë[l]et go, let fly, forgetí is taken on board by the
drifting poet in part three with the poem ëSweeney Redivivusí. This is
not a letting go of myth as the poet transforms himself into Mad
Sweeney, but as Corcoran notices, it is an attempt to go beyond the
recognized and the known.^40 Heaney explains in Sweeney Astray that
ëSweeney is [...] the artist, displaced, guilty, assuaging himself by his
utterance, it is possible to read the work as an aspect of the quarrel
between the free creative imagination and the constraints of religious,
political, and domestic obligation.í^41 The poetic consciousness be-
comes torn between different influences. In interview with Seamus
Deane, Heaney develops the issue of divided consciousness:
In this Sweeney story we have a Northern sacral king, Sweeney, who is driven
out of Rasharkin in Co. Antrim. There is a lot of schizophrenia in him. On the
one hand he is always whinging for his days in Rasharkin, but on the other he is
celebrating his free creative imagination.^42The figures of Simon Sweeney, King of the Ditchbacks, and ëSweeney
Redivivusí take on the problem of how, in schizophrenia, to find a
middle ground.^43
As Corcoran notices, Sweeneyís journey transforms the places of
Ireland which are ëtranslatedí ëinto their modern equivalentsí, in the
hope ëthat gradually the Northern Unionist or Protestant readership
might, in some miniscule way feel able to identify with the Gaelic
40 Corcoran, p.172.
41 Heaney, Sweeney Astray (London: Faber, 1983), ii.
42 Deane, ëUnhappy and at Home: Interview with Seamus Heaneyí, The Crane
Bag Book of Irish Studies, eds., Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney
(Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982), p.70.
43 Cf. Anthony Clare, In the Psychiatristís Chair (London: Chatto, 1998). Clare, a
broadcaster and Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, explores
schizophrenia and the large number of cases in Ireland. Heaneyís notion of
ëdivided consciousnessí can also be read alongside the Algerian writer and
psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon. Cf. Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986).